We wanted the Paladin back, but in a darker version. That's what become the Crusader

Knight in scarred armor, versus the Paladin's Knight in shining armor

Design of a new character begins with the silhouette

The shield is an important part of the character, also used as a melee weapon

Lots of concepts were drawn (see pictures below, after panel has ended)

After a lot of brainstorming the team decides on the pillars of the Crusader - big and bulky, cloth and shield

After concepts begins modeling. Once that is done the team goes into production

Several tier armors are shown

For animation everything begins with an idle pose

The flail's physics were specifically made to look very realistic

Shield Bash is showcased. The Crusader charges his shield and shoots out holy damage out of it

The Crusader loves to be up close and personal, but Diablo III already has 2 melee characters. That's why a strong ranged component was added

Wrath is the resource and it generates outside combat, but is also generating with Primary skills

Crusader won't be able to dual-wield, he needs a shield

He starts with 24 skills

Developers experimented with a skill like Zeal, but it didn't work too well. In Diablo 2 you had 2 skill buttons, but in Diablo 3 you have 6. You have utility skills, AoE and other things. Zeal demands you press only it. The visual was also hard to read

In the end though Zeal become a rune for Slash

Fist of Heavens felt so good that the developers still haven't made changes to it since its implementation. Literally its first version is in the game

Heaven's Fury's went through several iterations. The first version was constant beams shooting from the skies below the cursor. Second version was a single beam going after the cursor. The third version is AI controlled and simply follows enemies while the Crusader deals with other monsters

Steed Charge makes the Crusader dash super fast, on the back of a horse and looks quite awesome!

Blessed Hammer is a nice reminder that the Crusader is still at least somewhat related to the Paladin

The Other Classes

Barbarian's new skill is Avalanche. 30 second cooldown. Cooldown is reduced with Fury spent

Wizard is getting a bit more love with the elements, up until now she had mostly Arcane skills

Arcane Orb now has a rune that makes it resemble Frozen Orb from Diablo II

Wizard's new skill is called Black Hole - sucks enemies inside of it. Nothing prepares a good Meteor like Black Hole

The Monk should be the fastest character on the battlefield.

Fists of Thunder's teleport is now baseline

Monk's New skill is Epiphany. Allows all melee attacks to teleport you to your opponent

Demon Hunters should feel a lot more ranged and use more traps

Demon Hunter's new skill is called Vengeance. Every attack you do fires more shots. Rockets, arrows, etc.

Witch Doctor's mechanics aren't 'all there'. One of the fantasies is to be a Pet class. Pets don't do enough damage though. Same goes for being a DoT class

One of his new passives is to make his DoTs last 5 minutes

Witch Doctor's new skill is Piranhas. Enemies affected will take more damage from all sources. Below the water's surface (of where Piranha's spawn) is actually a massive crocodile that swallows enemies whole

Items

The new Artisan is the Mystic - she can Transmogrify and Enchant items

Enchanting lets you chose one property to reroll and offer 3 new, plus the same property, as a new roll

The Loot 2.0 philosophy is: Less is more, Items Support Builds, Rarity = Power

Smart Drop affects Item Type, Items Stats and Skill Affixes

Previously some rolls were 1-100 Strength (for example). Now the range is much lesser: 75-100

Item stats are now separated into Primary and Secondary. All items will have a fixed number of both. It's displayed on the tooltip

Legendary used to be hard to find in the game. Players wanted more of them, but really they just wanted them to be better

The new philosophy for the expansion is "endgame for everyone"

Legendary are still by far the most rare items, but are also the most powerful in RoS, by far

Legendary items will drop at the killed monster's level. If you kill a level 33 monster you can get a level 33 Legendary

How big is the item stat inflation?
It's a concern we might have in 8-9 years. We love big numbers.

Arcane Sanctuary from Diablo 2. Can it get some love?
We're not going back to the Arcane Sanctuary. Pandemonium Fortress has some aspects inspired from it. When you see the level you'll see a bunch of stuff in there.

In Diablo II character appearances changed if you complete an item set. Any plans to do so in D3?
We haven't talked about anything like that yet. It's not a terrible idea though, it might happen. Our focus right now is to make the set items and their bonuses feel as crazy as possible. It's totally possible we could add visual components.

This should be the indepth panel with Crusader and Gameplay discussion. Later there will be the open Q&A but don't hold your breath for it, i foresee many wasted questions like: "When is PvP coming?" "When is Beta?" "When is Release?". I know those are in the FaQ, but some people never learn.

"Developers experimented with a skill like Zeal, but it didn't work too well. In Diablo 2 you had 2 skill buttons, but in Diablo 3 you have 6. You have utility skills, AoE and other things. Zeal demands you press only it. The visual was also hard to read"

Such nonsense. "Demands you press only it"? What, like any other attack skill?
They can and do have good reasons to not put certain things into the game, but I hate it when they think everyone's a moron.
If anyone can explain that reasoning to me, that'd be great.

That was kinda disappointing.. Not so much because of what they said, but how little they said.
Only new thing was the Primary vs Secondary stats.
Which is a fairly bad "solution" anyway, since it just tries to hide the issues rather than fix them.

Quite underwhelming panel. Too much focus on the Crusader and they just talked again how Loot 2.0 works. I'm not sure if this expansion is ready for an early-mid 2014 release since they didn't talk at all about Nephalem Trials and "Devil's Hand", if this feature are even in the making anymore.

All I see is that they dont care that much about D3... All they care is Warcraft and all related content about that, that's why they announced RoS at Gamescom, because they dont have anything else to say about D3 and now they can at least fill that empty space with this"indepht D3 panel".
Anyway, I hope I'm wrong and they do have something to announce.

All I see is that they dont care that much about D3... All they care is Warcraft and all related content about that, that's why they announced RoS at Gamescom, because they dont have anything else to say about D3 and now they can at least fill that empty space with this"indepht D3 panel".
Anyway, I hope I'm wrong and they do have something to announce.

... they deliberately emptied a space in their schedule to deliberately fill it with not much?? Hm.

It's no suprise (to me) that there wasn't a lot of D3 coverage (although it's still disappointing)... Blizzard's already made a crapton of announcements. Remember also that D3X has a lot more room to move than WoW, so I'd expect a hell of a lot of iteration, especially when it goes into beta. Thanks to datamining, we already know a lot more details about what Blizzard is trying, and where they're going... and we also know that they care very about D3. You should probably put that little idea to bed.

Items are certainly getting better, but I think they'd have to gut the itemization completely (including weapon damage on skills, main stat) and replace it with something brand new to truly get it to the level most people want it to be. But that'd probably take 3x as long. Better to just work with what you got, I think.

Still, it's an improvement, but I probably expected too much from the item overhaul.

But I'll probably buy this thing day one despite all my hand wringing. hahaahha...

Also remember that if you hadn't read a single data-mined line of text, a lot of this would be pretty amazing to hear. I mean, I think most people were pretty floored when data-mined stuff started coming down.

All I see is that they dont care that much about D3... All they care is Warcraft and all related content about that, that's why they announced RoS at Gamescom, because they dont have anything else to say about D3 and now they can at least fill that empty space with this"indepht D3 panel".
Anyway, I hope I'm wrong and they do have something to announce.

... they deliberately emptied a space in their schedule to deliberately fill it with not much?? Hm.

It's no suprise (to me) that there wasn't a lot of D3 coverage (although it's still disappointing)... Blizzard's already made a crapton of announcements. Remember also that D3X has a lot more room to move than WoW, so I'd expect a hell of a lot of iteration, especially when it goes into beta. Thanks to datamining, we already know a lot more details about what Blizzard is trying, and where they're going... and we also know that they care very about D3. You should probably put that little idea to bed.

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear, I meant that they dont care to show anything about D3 at Blizzcon, not that they dont care about D3 at all. They announced everything at gamescon so that they could talk about that at Blizzcon without losing focus of their biggest announcements (HoS, Hearthstone, Warcraft). Anyway this is just my humble oppinion.